


Eighth

by NevillesGran



Category: Girl Genius, Old Kingdom - Garth Nix
Genre: Alternate Universe - Fusion, only the end of a much larger au
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-09-19
Updated: 2016-09-19
Packaged: 2018-08-15 23:35:40
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 7,758
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/8077750
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/NevillesGran/pseuds/NevillesGran
Summary: Finale of a could-probably-be-several-novels AU of Girl Genius set in the Old Kingdom, weaving together the mythologies and plots of both. This fic covers events roughly equivalent to the last half of Abhorsen, albeit with many scenes deleted for brevity. Everything previous in the AU is available in order here on tumblr.





	

**Author's Note:**

> Again, I heartily urge you to read everything [here](http://tanoraqui.tumblr.com/tagged/eighth/chrono) before reading this fic. Things won't make sense otherwise.
> 
> Catch the Buffy quote!

Agatha tumbled to the ground with an ungainly thump, her passengers jumping off with only a little more grace. Tarvek, at least, barely did better; he dropped the Muses some six feet up and they floated gently to the ground, but he skidded nearly twice as far towards the Wall, giant owl Charter skin unraveling in the dirt.

Agatha raced to meet him, giddy. “Tarvek! I flew! We were flying!” She grabbed Violetta and spun her around, heart still pounding with glee and her own power racing through her veins. “We were _flying!_ ”

“We were,” Violetta managed. She still looked a little green, as she had throughout the flight, clinging to Agatha’s back like a koala.

“I can fly!”

“I think you’ll find, Lady Heterodyne, that you can do more or less anything you put your mind to.” Mogget sat in the grass and carefully cleaned one paw. Anyone who thought he might have spent most of the flight from Edge digging his claws into Agatha’s shoulder and yowling was clearly mistaken.

“But you’d best conserve your power for now,” he added. “It may be difficult to cross the Wall, and then…”

There was little need to elaborate. The hemispheres would be crossing the Wall as well, could have already, with Vrin and what used to be Lucrezia. They could only hope to catch up in time to stop Orannis from reawaking fully. Could only hope other help arrived as well—the Clayr, Muses, Dog with Gil and Zeetha. Anyone, with any sort of better plan than “fight and hope.”

-

Of all the things Gil disliked about Ancelstierre - and there are many, from “Lucrezia’s not-a-tomb” to “they cook carrots wrong”—his foremost antagonism was probably reserved for guns. They were loud, difficult to aim, indicated by their very use that Charter magic would _not_ work here, and, most of all, people kept trying to kill him with them.

Thank the Charter he had a sister now.

“Zeetha! Cover?”

“Got you!”

The shout, and following hail of bullets, came from just around the corner at the end of the hallway in which Gil was trapped. None made their mark, but his Home First assailants at the other end dashed back behind their own corner. 

“Come on, your highness.” Gil ducked out of his alcove, tugging the Ancelstierran princess by the arm and probably getting her title wrong again. They didn’t have proper royalty down here either, just a “Hereditary Arbitrator” with one…whatever his simpering daughter was called. He would have at least expected her to want to stand and fight like one of the Clayr, but instead she clung to his arm like any common girl.

At least it made her easier to pull down the hallway, and into the room Zeetha was guarding. Except—

“I thought this was an audience chamber! With doors!”

Zeetha shrugged. “Remodeling.” It was more of a broom closet now. albeit a spacious one. A few old light bulbs flickered on the bones of a chandelier.

Gil cursed under his breath. He leaned the not-princess against the nearest wall, beside the Muse Saraneth. The Muse barely took notice, just held her scrolls tight to her chest and stared at him with a level gaze that left Gil with the distinct feeling that he didn’t measure up.

“Ma’am, can you do _something?_ ” he asked anyway. She had nearly taken their heads off when he and Zeetha found her yesterday, in her hidden room in the Tower of Arbitration.

Saraneth shook her head. “This is not my fight. Nor is it yours, Abhorsen. We _must_ go-”

Gil had heard it already. He didn’t know how much help she’d be anyway, marks half-faded away from whatever van Rijn had put in that room to keep her awake. His sword was similarly inert. His bells…

He realized he was running his hand down the bandolier, a nervous habit, and stopped. The bells would still work this far south, but without the Charter to constrain them, they would be discordant and unruly, a danger to wielder and listener alike. Free Magic always was.

“Where is my father?” the not-princess demanded, for at least the third time. She cared, at least.

“Safe,” Gil assured her. “Zanta– um, the– my mo–”

“He’s with General Skifander and a loyal complement of the Guard,” Zeetha mercifully interrupted. “They’ll be sending us backup any moment.”

Gil gave her a grateful shoulder bump as he joined her kneeling by the door. He still wasn’t sure what to call the general—his _mother_ —to her face, much less the protocol with a not-princess while hiding in a storage closet.

Go to Corvere; meet his missing family; find the last Muse with the instructions on binding the Destroyer; argue the Moot (as the chief representative of the Old Kingdom) into standing down this business with the Southerners, not to mention Section 31’s “experimental energy station”; avert the coup…it had seemed like a very simple plan when he’d promised Agatha he could do it.

He yelped at a bullet crashed through the door and nicked his shoulder—already shot yesterday, now swathed with bandages under his coat. Maybe if people would stop _shooting at him_. “Zeetha!”

“They know we’re cornered, and wood doesn’t stop bullets,” she snapped back. “Do you think I can make them cease fire?”

But she aimed carefully through the cracked-open door, and they both felt a man die on the other side. Zeetha grinned a little.

It would buy them a moment’s breath at best. Maybe backup would come—there was fighting throughout the palace—but…

Gil fingered Ranna again. There was only so much that could go wrong with the Sleeper.

The air shifted behind him, and something more—Life and Death splitting apart. Zeetha glanced back. Gil sprang to his feet, hands darting down to draw his sword, plain steel though it was, and Saraneth. Anything strong enough to emerge from Death here would be _terrifying_.

“Get back,” he ordered the not-princess. The Muse was already fading into the shadows at the back of the room, ready, no doubt, to defend her charge of knowledge unto the end.

Death opened with a breath of chill and acrid Free Magic. The light bulbs above blew out—

and the Disreputable Dog appeared in the darkness, glowing faintly and panting as if she’d just run a league. But she spared the energy to wag her tail when she saw them.

And every Charter mark on Gil’s sword and bells lit up.

“Oh, thank _Shiners_.” He turned back toward the door, and the assailants outside, with a fierce grin. “My turn.”

\- -

Agatha ran through the Eighth Precinct, dodging around the fires floating over the water, ears all but swiveling to catch any sound of pursuit. It turned out that when you’d been practicing magic for about three subjective months, and you picked a fight with a necromancer who’d been raising the dead a century before you were born, sometimes you didn’t do very well. Her right side was a pile of bruises, no blood yet but chainmail dug into the skin like thorns, and she’d lost Tarvek’s sword—the Muse Astarael’s sword, brought from Castle Heterodyne—over the edge of the Fifth Precinct bridge.

Vrin would be slower now, too, though. Agatha may not have been much better with a sword than with an old broom—worse, really; time with the Destroyer itself, or as close as could be while it wasn’t free yet, and the high priestess wasn’t responding to Agatha’s commands at all anymore. But random flailing could do the trick sometimes. _Agatha_ had drawn blood.

Lady Vrin was, Agatha thought, a little irritated at that. Good.

There was a loud crackling behind her: the Seventh Gate. Agatha risked a glance back. Vrin could have been a stylized portrait if she’d held still: white skin wreathed in black smoke, surrounded by the burning red of the Gate.

She stalked forward instead, flames where her eyes should have been, slow as a cat leisurely playing with a mouse.

Agatha needed a break. She ran ahead, into the inky blackness of the Eighth Gate. She knew the spell to go through, had it memorized word-perfect since she’d read the inscription in the Castle Heterodyne library.

The Ninth Precinct was…open. That was the first impression. There were no boundaries in Death save the Gates, but there was always a sense of nearness, of closing in. The Ninth Precinct was not empty—there were Dead everywhere Agatha looked, mostly staring upward. Rising upward. Yet it was infinite. (A paradox, mused the scientific, Ancelstierran part of Agatha’s mind. An infinite space full of a finite number of beings ought still, ultimately, be empty.)

She followed their gaze upwards, taking a couple absentminded steps from the Gate. The Eighth Gate was darkness; the Ninth Gate was stars. High above they shone, in that infinite space. Refreshing and inviting at once. She could close her eyes but she didn’t need to—she could rest, stop struggling every second, with her eyes wide upon those stars.

She unwrapped the bandages from her hands as she rose. They’d been there to keep Tarvek’s Charter-sword from burning her while she fought Vrin. Either they had worked, or even the Charter had agreed it was a fight worth making alliance for. But she didn’t need them anymore…

She really ought to find him another sword somehow, though. And return that kiss as well, on the hilltop before she’d gone to challenge Vrin. And Gil– Zeetha– her people, _Mechanicsburg_ —

Agatha’s boots splashed down in the water again, and she blinked once, twice, three times fast. Tore her gaze away from the sky. The water didn’t flow here; it didn’t need to.

So that was the Ninth Gate. Interesting.

She looked around, though she hardly needed to in order to know: Vrin hadn’t followed her here. Most necromancers were afraid of the Ninth Gate.

Agatha squared her shoulders. She still had her family bells, and a job to do. She drew Saraneth and walked back into the Eighth Gate—

Almost. It split open instead, first a lick of orange and then Vrin, wearing flames like a cloak. The first stroke of her sword sliced Agatha’s bandolier at the shoulder; the whole piece fell as Agatha jumped back from a second blow. All she held was the Binder.

“Traitorous whelp,” Vrin hissed. She didn’t draw her own bells, just kept pushing Agatha back with her sword. But there was no “back” to retreat to, in the endless Ninth Precinct. “I should have killed you as soon as we summoned the Lady. You were rebellious even then.”

“You could have tried,” Agatha retorted. Saraneth rang true in her hand, but she could hear the waver in her own voice. Declined the Ninth Gate though she had, she was still tired. Had flown from Edge to the Wall on her own power, and had scant sleep since then, racing to the “power station” with the Perimeter Scouts.

Vrin didn’t flinch. The sword blazed through the empty air. As Agatha threw up an arm to block it, a tongue of flame flicked Saraneth from her hand. It landed in the water with a quiet, useless _plunk_. She stumbled backwards again.

Vrin’s laugh was cruel and cold. “Your mother joined with a god. You…”

She circled, looking down at Agatha. Agatha turned slowly to glare back.

“You will die alone, now. No friends, no family, no filthy monsters.” She raised her sword for a final strike. “Take those away and what do you have?”

Agatha caught the blade as it flashed down. It burned the bandages wrapped around her palms, but not her skin.

“ _Me_.”

\- - -

The Charter was good for a great many things. Light, warmth, healing…even darkness, chill, and death, in more dangerous hands. Shining creation and mind-numbing destruction.

Restraining the Dead was not particularly high on the list.

Tarvek gritted his teeth. Dead Hands we easy enough—they were flesh and blood, if rotting and congealed. Even Violetta—stones, even the paltry mages among the Ancelstierrans could manage a physical defensive spell against flesh and blood. They mostly were, at this point: Tarvek could still feel those charms, but his attention was on the Shadow Hands. He could barely see them through the darkness and driving rain, but he could feel them, twisting and slipping around of his spells like the nothingness they were. He cast and recast light, bindings, anything he could think of. He _couldn’t_ let them get through. Not to the soldiers, nor, worse, the refugees in the valley below.

Nor Agatha. Never Agatha. The presence by his side, ice-cold in Death. She was right, of course: if was better to fight this problem at the source. But he wished desperately that she was back with him, for a hundred hundred reasons.

“Tarvek.” Violetta. She pointed, pale with the effort of keeping up her own spells. There were too many Dead Hands to fight, especially when Agatha had his (Astarael’s) sword; it was easier, paradoxically, to keep up a magical barrier. Barely.

There was a flicker of darkness where she pointed, creeping up the grass. He threw Charter marks without thinking and caught another Shadow Hand. That made five, all writhing and inching forward. He could only cast so many spells at once, could only focus on so many things.

The rain stung his eyes, plastered his hair to his forehead, but he ignored it. Agatha remained frozen beside him. His vision narrowed as he didn’t even bother to sketch marks anymore, just let them flow from his hands, spells shifting with the Deathly shadows. They were getting weaker, he could feel it—his spells, not the Shadow Hands. _They_ were fine, as lightning struck again and again over the next ridge. Tarvek was tiring.

It flickered through his mind that he could switch magics. He could still whistle a strong Saraneth, bind the Dead in a way that wouldn’t slough off almost as fast as the rain….No—he’d barely managed Anevka, and that was with Kibeth’s help. Mosrael and Dyrim were here now, but this wasn’t a battle for waking or speech. And Tarvek had hated Death. Didn’t have the sense of it at all.

There was a sudden increase in the noise behind him—exclamations, someone snapping with an Ancelstierran accent. Nobody attacked him, nor asked for his help, so Tarvek didn’t take notice. A Shadow Hand escaped his grasp completely for a moment and a blast of energy just barely kept it from plowing into Violetta. It rocked on its heels for half a moment. Tarvek summoned more marks to mind, and thought he might be shaking where he stood.

A hand fell on his shoulder, familiar, warm power rolling down his arm. Every spell brightened in the rain, and held.

“Sorry,” said Gil. “Am I late again?”

Tarvek could have slapped him. Could have sagged against him, except suddenly he didn’t need to anymore. (Could, he thought while staring sideways at Gil’s eyes crinkling in amusement, lean forward just a smidgen and kiss him.)

“No, we’re still waiting for Agatha,” he said instead. And then, getting control of himself again, “Are you going to do your damn job?”

“Yeah.” Gil was still grinning at him, ridiculously bright in the dark and the rain with the Dead all around and the Destroyer rising. Tarvek felt the most absurd urge to smile back.

Gil drew a bell and turned to the Muse beside him, whom Tarvek hadn’t even seen. Had never seen. She had a bundle of papers tucked under one arm.

“Would you—”

She smile did back, something between an indulgent professor and a hunting cat. “My pleasure, Abhorsen.” She opened her mouth and sang, Saraneth clear and pure. Tarvek dropped his spells with a sigh as Gil chimed in with Kibeth and all the Dead things started moving, jerking away. The Shadow Hands disappeared and the Dead Hands fell, inanimate.

Tarvek took the opportunity to look back. There were still the Southerlings to deal with—but an authoritative-looking woman in an Ancelstierran Army uniform had already started corralling them, or at least lecturing fiercely, arguing with a gaggle of clan heads. Zeetha was at her heels. Violetta sat at Agatha’s feet, exhausted. Tarvek glanced up. Even the rain was slacking (though lightning continued to strike.) He squinted. And were those—paperwings? Yes, coming from the north, striped with Clayr green and Abhorsen blue.

“Is there even anything else for me to do?” he asked rhetorically. Joking. (Half hoping the answer would be “no.”)

“Yes.” The Dead temporarily dispelled, Saraneth handed him her scroll. He recognized van Rijn’s Remembrancer seal.

Her sisters stood behind her, close like they didn’t want to let her out of their sight. Saraneth continued, imperious: “The others will arrive any moment, and then we will all have a great deal to do.”

\- - - -

Klaus fell asleep to Ranna, tinkling soft and sweet and his, and his eyes snapped open again at a single stern knell of Saraneth. The dread coiled in his gut remained constant. Free Magic crackled around the bell’s pure tone, Lucrezia’s brand, or what she had adopted—become?—while he’d been gone. He folded at the first touch, slaved to the Dead thing nestled at the back of his throat, and couldn’t think what she needed the bell for. Showing off?

“ _Out_.”

The daughter, not Lucrezia herself, but that made no difference. He didn’t know how she had escaped his self-imposed trap, and didn’t want to wonder what she had done to Gil. They weren’t in Mechanicsburg anymore, he could tell that much, but Free Magic still wafted like smoke in the air.

“Let go.” She rang the bell again. Her voice was almost coaxing, but Saraneth gripped him in iron chains. His hands shook, releasing the nothing he’d been holding. He was flat on his back in a grassy knoll. Lucrezia didn’t quite fill his field of vision, but it was difficult to focus on anything else.

Except…the bell didn’t quite bind _him_. Klaus convulsed, coughing; rolled onto his side and spat out the wasp, already crawling back up his throat at its mistress’s order. It died for good at her will, too. Its hold on him snapped like a taut wire and he could breathe again.

He pushed himself into a sitting position and glared suspiciously at Lucrezia. The Charter was faint—why were they in Ancelstierre? “What new trick–”

“I am _Agatha Heterodyne_.” she said in a tone that brooked no argument. It was true that she didn’t sound like Lucrezia, nor move like her. “I’m not certain I trust you, but…”

She stood, offered him a hand up, and only then did he notice the small crowd behind her, all within a single great diamond of protection. Three diamonds, layered.

To the side, a gaggle of Muses surrounded a young man with red hair—some royal scion or another—kneeling over a sword. But here was Gil staring back at him with a guarded expression, tired in full uniform. The Mogget was judging Klaus from his feet. Another redhead hovered half a step behind the Heterodyne, giving the distinct impression that she would have a knife in Klaus’s belly if he moved too fast. A Clayr observed with studied dispassion, and the Perimeter Scout who’d been tailing the Heterodyne Girl, who looked far, far too much like—

Zantabraxus had a hand on the scout’s shoulder. She looked…unimpressed.

Over the hill behind them, several bolts of lightning struck down at once. The air burned with the acrid taste of Free Magic.

“…it seems we need your help to save the world.”

\- - - - -

[Meanwhile, or perhaps even slightly before]

“I can’t do that!”

Tarvek stared at the Muses, and at the sword in his hands. Back at the Muses. “I can’t—I can’t just kill you.”

“You will not,” Dyrim said patiently. “No more than the Disreputable Dog is dead, now that she has returned to a less animate form.” The soapstone statue was now resting in Zeetha’s pocket, exhausted from her trip to Corvere and back. “We will simply be…elsewhere.”

“But…” He ran his hands along the blade, careful not to touch the sharpened edges. The Abhorsen’s sword, Gil’s sword (Agatha suggested, and Tarvek agreed, that Klaus really had no right to take back the title after what he’d done to Gil. Gil was doing the job just fine.) Though Tarvek would need to bleed on it soon, to get this done. He could already imagine the marks he’d use, the crescendo of spells—

“Abhorsen van Rijn was very wise,” added Belgaer (she could speak again. He had fixed that.) “But he Saw the past, not the future.”

“And he thought so well of us,” Mosrael added, just a touch wistful. All their sentences ran together as if the Muses spoke with one voice. “That we could bind the Destroyer ourselves…”

“We would spare you the pain–” Ranna said softly, kindly.

“But this is how it must be.” Saraneth’s words had the weight of law.

“But–”

“Prince Tarvek.”

Tarvek swiveled to look at Astarael, spine stiffening on some reflex rooted in a scant year getting caught sneaking around the royal palace with Gil, back in Belisaere. A whole year mattered, when you were seven. Though back in her own body, the Muse of Protection sounded exactly as strict as she had when she caught them by the scruffs of their necks and towed them bodily back to bed. Or when she had saved them and Agatha from the Free Magic constructs in Castle Heterodyne. Or—a hundred other times he could only imagine. Wanted to get the chance to experience.

“You are a Wallmaker,” she said severely. “It is your duty to make the things that guard the realm. As it is ours to be a part of it.”

“Does the walker choose the path, or the path, the walker?” Kibeth asked. She smiled at the play on her name, but her eyes were serious, and entirely lucid for the first time in years. “We chose this centuries ago.”

Her sisters nodded as one. The Muses reunited, like he’d always dreamed. And a throne and a crown, Belisaere in red and gold and the Great Charter whole and at his fingertips…

Lightning crashed and ozone and Free Magic filled the air. Silver spades on violet rested on his back. Some dreams turned out differently than you thought when you were seven.

But the Charter was still ready at his fingertips, the same great river of marks he’d always taken refuge in. “All right.” van Rijn hadn’t left instructions for this, but Tarvek didn’t need them. “Put your hands on the blade on by one, and I’ll weave you in.”

Golden marks fell from his hands, his muttering lips, as if they were eager to be used. From Ranna, too, as she placed one hand on the heating blade and dissolved. Dust motes scattering away from movement in a sunbeam, leaving only a single, tired note to slip down into the spell Tarvek wove around the sword. She had been working the longest, had kept the Storm King asleep for centuries, and then the A—Klaus, on the paperwing from Mechanicsburg until Agatha could free him of her mother’s wasp.

Mosrael next, smiling as she broke apart. Tarvek remembered the shiver in his chest at the echo outside Mechanicsburg, as Agatha took her throne.

Kibeth kissed him on the forehead as she rested her hand on the flat of the blade. “You were a wonderful king while you were mine.” Tears dripped from Tarvek’s eyes, but they didn’t disturb the working in his hands.

“You’re doing fine,” said Dyrim. Belgaer rested a hand on his shoulder for a moment, and whispered in his ear, “Look out for that new piece of music.” Saraneth just nodded, and closed her eyes.

Astarael—hesitated, looking over his shoulder. Tarvek could not have stopped his forging if his life had depended on it—if _Agatha’s_ life had depended on it—but he followed her gaze anyway. Gil was speaking to his father, with Corporal Zeetha and her mother (Gil’s mother) joining in as well. Agatha and Violetta looked on, though Agatha seemed on the verge of joining the argument.

“Look after each other,” Astarael said finally, and for once her song didn’t pull Tarvek into Death—he was too surrounded by golden fire, the sword burning as the Sorrowful joined her sisters. He gave the master marks at a shout, sealing the spell. Seven bells, seven Muses, in one sword.

And not a second too soon. Lightning struck one last time, a thundering crack with a percussion wave like a blast of desert wind, and a deep voice boomed over the hill. Orannis.

“FREE!”

\- - - - - -

They all did their best to ignore the whirling column of fire that was the Destroyer, as Agatha explained the plan.

“We’ll each be standing in for one of the original Seven. Everyone take a bell from Gil—” Her hand hovered over her own bandolier, awkwardly. But they needed Charter magic for this. “—Whichever feels right for you. Speaks to your blood. Whoever takes Astarael will take the sword as well, which…” It was hard to believe the Muses were gone, just like that. “Which Tarvek just imbued with each of the bells as well. They will make the final cut, once we’ve all bound the Destroyer with this simple spell, which I’ll teach you in a moment.”

It was in van Rijn’s instructions, but she didn’t want to show them to anybody who hadn’t already read them. She already had a sense of who would wield which bell.

“In a couple minutes, the Destroyer will reach its second stage of power, which hopefully the diamonds will protect us from. Then there’ll be another lull, and we’ll all go down and cast the spell.” For a moment, every detail of circumstance aside, it felt so much like one of Dr. Beetle’s lectures that she asked, “Any questions?”

Zantabraxus raised her hand, a dry quirk to her lips. But her tone was entirely serious. “I’m rather left out of all your magical bloodlines business. I hope that won’t disrupt anything?”

“No, ma’am.” Agatha sort of wished the general had left with the Southerners and Ancelstierran soldiers, once she’d miraculously gotten them to move to safety, if only for Gil and Zeetha’s peace of mind. But she had refused to be left behind again. Agatha could understand that. “There’s a point where it’s going to be a matter of will, more or less. You can be support.”

“I can do that.” She gripped Klaus’s hand. She hadn’t let go of him since they’d finished arguing about things twenty-years done—or, put the argument on hold until after the Ninth Bright Shiner had been dealt with. Another reason for her to stay: he seemed much less inclined to fight anyone else while she was around.

“And you?” Zantabraxus raised one shrewd eyebrow. “Beg pardon, but my impression is that you are very much _not_ of any Charter family.”

“I have the Destroyer’s own power in my blood, from my mother. That will let me fight it, with one of the bells.”

She said it with a great deal more confidence than she felt. But she would _not_ be distracted again, as she had been at the lake. There was no room for error anymore.

Mogget’s tail lashed at her words, though he wasn’t paying much heed to the conversation. He sat at the corner of the diamond, gaze fixed on Orannis’s raging fire. It had grown taller, well over a mile now, casting a malevolent orange light over the entire horizon.

There was another moment of silence. Then Gil took off his bandolier and held it out, plucking one bell for his own.

“Mosrael for me, I think,” he said with the slightest defiant jut of his chin. The necromancer’s bell. His eyes skittered off his father, daring a comment.

Klaus only nodded. He did know his son. The Waker drew its wielder into Death in payment for pulling their subject out, and van Rijn had not given its voice to the Muse of Compassion for no reason.

“I’ll take Saraneth,” he said, with an equally faint note of apology. But he looked more comfortable with the bell in hand.

Tarvek paused over Kibeth, cheeks still damp with tears, but settled on Dyrim the Speaker. Zeetha cast him a sympathetic look and took Kibeth herself, patting the pocket in which she carried a small soapstone statue of a dog. “I really liked traveling with the Circus,” she offered as explanation.

“This one’s the weakest, right?” Violetta didn’t quite joke as she took Ranna, the smallest and quietest. (Ranna who had kept all Mechanicsburg asleep for over a year.)

Colette took Belgaer with a smirk at Gil and Tarvek, easily reminiscent of time spent “studying.” “Someone’s got to have some common sense.”

 _Someday_ Agatha was going to find out what trouble they had all gotten into in the Clayr library. In the meantime…

“And Astarael for me,” she said with the same firm confidence. She held out her hand and Tarvek passed her the sword—hesitating just out of reach for a moment, then laying the hilt on her still-bandaged palm. It stung even through the wrapping. It was longer than it had been, tinted blood-red, Charter marks gleaming silver and gold.

(He exchanged determined glances with Gil. They had both read van Rijn’s full instructions for the binding.)

She was just done demonstrating the spell when the light flashed, searing spots in everyone’s vision, and the Destroyer’s silver sphere rocketed upward on a pillar of white flame.

“Turn away and close your eyes!” Agatha screamed as the percussion started. And continued, blinding destruction—a wave of energy so hot it stopped being fire, was just light and heat and force. The trees shriveled to ash, the lightning rods melted, the very earth of the hill blew apart, blasted over their heads.

The diamonds held, for a while. The first fell in a breath to the initial blast. The next bore up a few seconds longer, holding off the rocks and ash and steam of what was once a nearby stream. The third, innermost, lasted nearly half a minute, and by then the worst was over—they were all parched in an instant from the heat and driving wind, but it was survivable.

“Come on!”

Agatha moved first— if anything, she felt energized in the blackened wasteland. The others followed, hastily muttering spells to protect them from the heat and miasma. Mogget picked up the rear, a single clean white speck in a landscape of ash.

Moving was harder as they got closer. The sky was night-dark with clouds; only Orannis shone, a sphere of dark red flames that seemed to snap at the air around itself, devouring. Even Agatha felt like choking on the acrid stench of Free Magic, so strong it seemed to be eating away the backs of their throats. The others coughed; Agatha’s blood boiled as she made her way through the piles of cinders still shifting in the wind.

But she stifled the rage, swallowed it, channeled it into her own determination. The Destroyer thought it could come into her world, her family, and break it? As if they were toys? Her Castle, her friends— _her_ power. Not Orannis’s. Her blood, her mother’s and father’s who’d died together (or damn well should have), and water from the Dyne, and bits and pieces of everywhere she had been, everything she had seen and done, this past crazy year.

Just barely over a year! Since leaving Wyverly, not forty miles away!

Agatha had taken the long way around.

She was almost surprised when they reached the sphere. She coughed when she first tried to speak, then managed, “Form a circle.” She walked to the other side herself, sword on her shoulder and Astarael raised in her left hand.

It hurt just to grip the bell. She remembered that Vrin had burnt her hand. She’d forgotten in all the…everything.

They circled the burning sphere, seven points on a star. Agatha opened her mouth to speak, cough out the start of the spell.

Orannis beat her to it.

\- - - - - - -

“So.” The boom of its voice shook Agatha’s bones. “Orannis rises again, and another Seven rise to stop me. Vrin has failed, of course, as all living beings shall—until I am alone, in a perfect world of ash and Death and nothing.”

Red flames licked out, straight for the bell-holders, as if testing them. Agatha took an involuntary step backwards, and saw all the others do the same.

“Yes.” The Destroyer sounded immensely self-satisfied. “All living beings. Such a paltry attempt at the Seven, too. To bind Orannis, the greatest of the Nine, the Destroyer of worlds! You shall FAIL.”

Its voice cracked like thunder, deafening. Flames shot out once more, burning the very air. Worse was the power of the declaration, like a blow to the chest.

Agatha gritted her teeth and refused to do more than lean back. Her feet were planted in the Ready stance Zeetha had taught her, not even a year ago on the road with the circus.

There was no indication that Orannis turned its attention to her, save that she suddenly felt a horrible focus, immobilizing, burning her skin. Rage filled her, lust for destruction.

“You are not even of my weak siblings.” Fire shivered in her blood. “What hope do you have for this mockery of a fight? You are mine.”

It was almost helpful. Suddenly she could be back in Castle Heterodyne, back beneath grave dirt and death and monsters, beside the spring of her family’s power. She could feel it reaching out as she reached back, spitting and burning and bright electric through her veins.

“I am _mine_ ,” she repeated. She raised her bell and thought of the weeping figure in the cave, and the Muse who had nearly killed her three times for people she loved. Agatha had not touched the Charter since the bridge at Passholdt, but she sketched the mark in the air easily with her sword. “And I stand for Astarael against you.”

“We stand for Saraneth against you.” Klaus and Zantabraxus spoke together, and her hand rested on his as he sketched their mark. It was not difficult at all to see why he had stayed with her for years in Ancelstierre, before duty summoned him home.

“I stand for the Clayr, and Belgaer against you.” Colette drew her mark like pinning proclamations to a door, and spoke like a challenge to a duel.

“I stand for Dyrim against you.” Even covered in ash, Tarvek was in fine form, as supercilious and deliberately graceful as if he were speaking to his less-liked cousins.

Zeetha didn’t have a Charter mark on her forehead, but for this it didn’t matter. She’d sensed the dying in Corvere, growing up, and her sketch glowed as strongly as the others. “I stand for Kibeth against you.”

Gil glanced sideways at her, and their parents. “I am Gilgamesh Skifander, Abhorsen,” he said proudly. “And I stand for Mosrael against you.”

Violetta rolled her eyes just _ever_ so slightly at the dramatic pronouncement. “I stand for Ranna against you,” she said simply, and began to ring her bell. Gil joined in, then Zeetha, and the tolling hopscotched back around the circle until Agatha added the last note with Astarael.

For once, the Weeper did not send her listeners into Death. She evoked Life as well, and the heart-shattering beauty of it: the bright and lonely moon and stars, the growing grass struggling in wind, the animals fighting and fleeing and living and dying, generations upon generations. The bells sang the song of the world, of all that was and all that could be, would be, as this song that was also the Charter bound the Destroyer once more.

The power only grew and grew in Agatha, shimmering over her skin, until she thought she might burst from it. It overflowed into the mark she’d left in the air, and everyone else’s. The marks glowed and shifted. stretched, connected all in one bright band around the Destroyer’s dark flames. The band constricted, the sphere shrunk, and bell-ringers stepped forward as one.

Orannis fought back. Fire licked out, snapping at the spell. The bells sang back, a tumultuous chorus that never failed to harmonize. Agatha threw everything she had into it, and Mechanicsburg with her. She could feel them, almost see them, the entire city paused for a breath to answer their Heterodyne’s summons. The Castle, looming and deadly and constant; Van arguing with his secretary again, halfway through his third cup of coffee in as many hours; the waitresses in the café and Krosp’s rat-catcher in the graveyard and the Burgmeister categorizing his socks again because he had nothing better to do. Even Dr. Sun in the hospital, the convicts moving rocks outside the cathedral, Moloch von Zinzer directing them. Everyone who had lived there long enough to be hers, and she theirs.

And her Hunting Dead, the whole Wild Hunt storming south, every nimble scout and lumbering general Dead for centuries and racing to help. They roared in welcome as she flashed through them, a finer network than even the Charter. Everything living fled in their path as they gave Agatha all they had and more.

She flung every drop into the spell, Free Magic and Charter mingling just as the original Seven, and the band constricted again. And again. Orannis’s flames grew darker and the sword rested heavy on her shoulder, ready to be used.

“No.”

Orannis’s voice was devoid of emotion, but full of the finality of the end of the universe. The sphere brightened again, tongues of flame flicking out to gnaw at the shining band of the binding spell, twisting and tearing it.

“Too long was I bound!” it roared. The bells faltered as the ringers stepped back. “Too long trapped in metal, under earth, impotent. I am Orannis, greatest of the Nine, and I! Will! DESTROY!”

The spells stretched like rubber, almost too dim to see in the Destroyer’s blaze. The would-be binders stumbled back another step. The bells still rang, but their song sounded weak, desperate.

Agatha felt like a little girl again, trapped and helpless with Barry’s locket. She didn’t miss it. But there was nothing she could do.

Kibeth continued to sound, but Zeetha bend down, and there was an extra jingle of Saraneth like the bell on a cat’s collar.

“Be free, Mogget!” she called as the lightning-white fire rose up. “Choose well!”

It loomed over her for a moment, then flickered over to Klaus, lunging down as if to bite him. He glared up at it, not giving an inch. Zantabraxus didn’t flinch either.

It moved to Gil. He stared back, eyes wide with pleading but mouth a grim line.

It flashed around the rest of the circle, ignoring Colette, Tarvek, Violetta. It paused again at Agatha, and she felt as though she were being weighed in judgment.

She had made a deal with this being, once, to save her…friends. Another to defend her town. Both had fallen apart.

“Please,” she whispered, too quietly for anyone to here.

But in her mind, straight past her ears, there was a crackling, long-suffering sigh, and, “I’ll take that.”

Agatha gasped, dry, as the power of the Dyne shifted. From her, her monsters, Mechanicsburg—the being that was Mogget took it up like a traveller with a familiar old cloak. It glowed brighter and shifted, condensed, into a mostly human shape that shone like a star.

“I am Yrael,” it said, stretched out its hand and cast and burning rope of power into the spell. “I also stand against you.”

The band strengthened, shrunk inwards again. The new Seven stepped with it automatically, buoyed by the original Eighth—as of course Mogget was, Yrael. _The Eighth did hide,_ _hide all away / But the Seven caught him and made him pay,_ van Rijn’s poem said.

Agatha did not have time to dwell on it now. She swung Astarael with all her might, and gripped the hilt of her sword. As the Destroyer shrank, fading, her moment approached.

Orannis did not go easy. Blood-red flames snapped at the circle and boiling winds rushed past their faces. But Ranna lulled, Mosrael called to arms, Kibeth danced and Dyrim chided, chiming. Belgaer proclaimed and Saraneth commanded and Astarael mourned. And through it all Yrael sang high and fierce, like rushing water and the cry of great hunting cats. Freedom and power and Life. The Destroyer dimmed. Silver veins appeared on its surface, widening, dousing the flames. The metal sphere reformed.

And spoke, bitter and cutting.

“Why, Yrael?” The sphere sank down to the earth, silver all the way through. “Why?”

Yrael’s reply came slowly, almost reminiscing. “Years ago, the first time, when I refused to fight, our siblings came hunting me. To bind me, as they would you, but for the high crime of neutrality.”

Its tone was arch on that. Agatha was barely listening, still duly ringing her bell as she stepped forward. The sword was unwieldy with only one hand. She only had once chance to get this right.

“I knew they would,” Yrael continued, “so I cheated them. Ripped out most of my power and buried it, hid it where they’d never find it. They never did—” smug, exactly like a cat who’d just stolen a fresh-caught fish—“but some humans dug it up instead. And they never _stopped_ fighting.”

Smoke still teased at her lungs, and the bells’ song swam about her. Agatha raised the sword above her head. It glimmered silver and red and gold. She felt Yrael’s gaze on her back, tinged with amusement and something like surprise.

“And do you know,” the Shiner concluded, “I think I rather like that.”

Agatha brought the sword down. The scream of metal shearing metal cut off every other sound.

The sword melted as it sliced through the sphere. Furious orange fire ran up the blade, devouring the hilt. Devouring her hand, her Life, raging. Orannis’s last vengeance, and desperate grab to stay whole. The Destroyer survived intact while the last sliver of her sword connected the new hemispheres, and there the sliver stayed while she held the sword. She could not let go. Her flesh burned.

van Rijn had warned of this. Of course the Destroyer would kill as it fell, and of course the stand-in for Astarael would be the one to go. _Family tradition_ , Agatha thought muzzily, as she bit her lip until it bled and refused to scream.

Tarvek was closer but Gil was faster, and hit him with an immobility charm before springing across the circle. Agatha had Gil’s sword but he’d borrowed one of Zeetha’s when Agatha wasn’t looking, and it flashed down on her wrist—

and stopped, caught in a curl of Free Magic fire that singed the Charter-spelled blade. Another, white-hot, sliced cleanly through Agatha’s forearm.

“Honestly.” Yrael drawled exactly like Mogget over Orannis’s fading scream of fury. “You two are far more trouble than you’re worth.”

It maintained less stubborn dignity than Agatha, yelping in pain as Orannis’s last desperate bid consumed its white flame in orange. Agatha scrambled back with Gil, staring, clutching her cauterized arm.

The hemispheres sprang apart as the fire died, one springing over Tarvek’s head and one knocking into Klaus’s chest. Yrael was still standing, but smaller, barely brighter than a campfire, shedding sparks without recreating them. No longer-human shaped, as if that was too much effort.

“Someone had better release me, before this form collapses completely.” Its tone was as dry as unconcerned as ever, but its voice scratched like a broken record.

Gil tugged reluctantly away from Agatha, his hands lingering on her waist. “Colette…”

Tarvek took his place. She thought about yelling at them both, for being so stupid as to try to save her, but she was so exhausted she found herself leaning gratefully against Tarvek’s chest instead.

Colette offered Gil her bell, but Yrael coughed, and jerked his head-like appendage at Klaus. “I think the Abhorsen…Emeritus, for propriety’s sake.”

Klaus lips twisted wryly as he accepted Belgaer. That was a good start, Agatha thought vaguely. (She rather suspected she was going into shock.) The Hunters would get here soon, she could feel the approaching the Wall. Then they could discuss exactly who would be ruling the kingdom now.

The Hunters. She pushed herself back to her feet, even as Belgaer pealed and the ring on Gil’s finger dissolved into dust.

“You aren’t going to take it all, are you?” she demanded of the squat pillar of sparks and fire. The Castle, her Dead, her living…herself, to think of it. She still felt curiously empty, in a way she hadn’t even before she lost her locket. “The Dyne. It may be yours, but…”

It’s _ours_. Mechanicsburg’s. Not that Agatha was certain how to stop Yrael, should it choose not to share.

She would find a way.

Yrael chuckled, the same sharp-edged muffled scream as always. “Your family has caused more amusing trouble for these ones than I could ever have arranged.” It gestured to the Abhorsen clan as it melted into a shower of sparks. “When I wake again, I’m sure we’ll come to an accord.”

The sparks fell upwards, scattering and disappearing into the clouds. The only source of light was suddenly the marks on the few spelled blades unsheathed, and on the bells still spread around the circle.

Including Astarael in Agatha’s hand. She didn’t have her own in her bandolier, either. It would be back at the Red Lake, she supposed, if Vrin hadn’t taken it or destroyed it.

Or maybe she could make her own, all-new bandolier. No doubt the Castle Heterodyne library had instructions. No need to use her ancestor’s bells, or even her parents’—just forge her own.

She looked around at her new friends and family, and the silver hemispheres split on the ground. She was still shocky and shaky, but a spark started regrowing in her chest. And the Hunt would be here soon, an hour at most.

A new set of bells, all her own, sounded excellent.


End file.
